Interview with Sarah Stahly and Bill Brand of VH1

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, June 9, 1997

And the other reason I didn't do it is I didn't think I was - I just wasn't sure I was good enough. I didn't think I would be truly great at it. And I thought if you're going to sacrifice your life to it and give your life to it, then you should know that you could really be great at it.

Q. It's kind of cool that Roger is doing music.

The President. Yes. Saw him on television last week, singing away.

Q. What's it like?

The President. I like it. I'm very happy for him, because it's all I think he's ever really wanted to do. He really just - once he started doing it and realized he was pretty good at it, he didn't care about anything else.

And one of the things that I want for every young person in this country is I want them to be free to be able to do what they want to do to live out their dreams. He's had to work hard and make a lot of sacrifices, but he's been able to do a lot of that.

Q. I want to talk about Mr. Sperlin -

The President. Yes, that's good.

Q. - and music education. You were talking about change and how when you were 16 you really had to think about it hard. Mr. Sperlin said that he realized that because you came back from Boys Nation, and he could see a difference, that you were still really committed to music, with all the bands you were in.

The President. When I went to Boys Nation, it sort of crystallized for me something that I had been thinking a long time, which is that I really - I had always been interested in politics; I had always been interested in public service; I had always been consumed with the issues that dominated my childhood, which were, in rough order, basically, first, the cold war, then the civil rights revolution, then the whole - all the social upheavals and the war in Vietnam. And all these things were - you couldn't be alive in the fifties and sixties and not be concerned about great public issues. And I thought I could make a difference, and I thought I could be really good at it. I thought I could do better at that than anything else. And it's something I thought I'd never get tired of, because you're always learning something new, there's always new people coming; there's always things happening.

And the judgment I made when I was 16, I have to say now that I'm 50 I feel - I don't know why I knew it then, but I was right. And I'm glad I did it. I never stopped loving music, but I just knew I couldn't - that I wouldn't be a musician.

That's the great thing about music, though. Most - 90-some percent of the people who do it don't become musicians. But I must say - I know that you talked to Virgil Sperlin, my band director, for this show, and he's a man who had a profound, positive influence on my life and on so many other people. And one of the things that's really disturbed me about education in America today is that so many schools have not been able to maintain their music programs, their arts programs, even their basic physical education programs, because these things are very important to human development, to emotional development, and to intellectual development. And they complement the academic programs.